Effective Assessment for Successful Teaching

Principles of Effective Teaching and Assessment course will be about effective strategies for teaching and assessment. After discussing about teaching strategies for about 8 session of the course, last meeting we were discussing about assessment. Besides that, we also discussed about evaluation and its differences compared to assessment. My lecturer gave us some questions that led us to the discussion of assessment itself. As usual, we did it in groups.

Assessment is the action to collect data of the learners to know in what level the learners are. Then assessment will be more stressed on individual learning. In the other hand, evaluation is more likely interpreted as something broader than assessment. Assessment as mentioned before is about collecting data to know learners’ ability, while evaluation is not only about collecting data but also making judgment on the quality of particular program. In other words we can say that assessment is part of evaluation.

Assessment is required for effective teaching. As we look at its definition, thus assessment really helps teachers in giving knowledge to their students. After teachers know at what lever their students are, teachers will be able to give learners what they really need. Then learners can be focus in improving their ability, in this case is language ability.

There are two types of assessment. First is formative assessment. This assessment usually occurs during the course in each topic of the lesson. Second is summative assessment. This kind of assessment is used to sum the entire topic of particular course. It is usually conducted at the end of the course.

Effective assessment should be appropriate for our purpose in assessing the learners. When we want to assess our students, we should consider what we really want to assess. Then we should decide the purpose of assessment itself. We also have to consider the instrument used in doing assessment. If we want to use instrument then it should support learners’ ability that we want to assess. For example, if want to assess learners’ reading ability, we should use instrument that supports learners’ reading ability such as any kind of text.

Teacher must know how to conduct assessment. I hope that there will be more deep discussion about assessment so that I can apply it well when I teach in real teaching.